head to head · open source
Crawl4AI vs scrapy-playwright
Crawl4AI has 85,632 GitHub stars, 8,894 forks, 188 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. scrapy-playwright has 1,458 stars, 163 forks, 22 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Crawl4AI leads on adoption by 5,773% (85,632 vs 1,458 stars). Crawl4AI is written in Python under Apache-2.0; scrapy-playwright is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause. Crawl4AI has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, scrapy-playwright 11%. scrapy-playwright was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (playwright, python), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| Crawl4AI | scrapy-playwright | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 86K | ★ 1.5K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-10-15 | 2026-10-15 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.9K | ⑂ 163 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Crawl4AI if
- You weight community size — 86K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick scrapy-playwright if
- You want the scrapy-playwright feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and scrapy-playwright fits your workflow better
About Crawl4AI
Crawl4AI is an open source web crawler and scraper designed to prepare website content for large language model (LLM) workflows. It lives in the Python ecosystem and targets data extraction for RAG, agents, and AI pipelines. Unlike many tools that require API keys or paid subscriptions, Crawl4AI provides direct, self hosted access to web content with output structured specifically for LLM consumption.
read the full Crawl4AI overview →
About scrapy-playwright
scrapy playwright is a Scrapy download handler that performs requests using Playwright for Python, so existing Scrapy crawlers can render pages that require JavaScript — built for Python developers who want browser grade rendering inside a normal Scrapy workflow.
read the full scrapy-playwright overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Crawl4AI or scrapy-playwright more popular?
Crawl4AI has 85,632 GitHub stars and scrapy-playwright has 1,458. Crawl4AI has the larger community by that measure.
Are Crawl4AI and scrapy-playwright free?
Both are open source. Crawl4AI is licensed under Apache-2.0 and scrapy-playwright under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Crawl4AI and scrapy-playwright?
Crawl4AI is written in Python and scrapy-playwright in Python. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Crawl4AI or scrapy-playwright?
Choose Crawl4AI if you want the larger community (85,632 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose scrapy-playwright if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.